Joseph Conrad

“ With a most pitiful howl Charley was over after her almost on the instant. But, Lord! he didn’t see as much as a gleam of her red tam-o’-shanter in the water. Nothing! Nothing whatever! In a moment there were half a dozen boats around us, and he got pulled into one. I, with the boatswain, and the carpenter, let go the other anchor and brought the ship up somehow. The pilot had gone silly. He walked up and down the forecastle-head, wringing his hands and muttering to himself: ‘Killing women, now! Killing women now!’ Not another word could you get out of him. ”

“ The Apses didn’t believe in them either, apparently. They treated their people well—as people don’t get treated nowadays—and they were awfully proud of their ships. Nothing ever happened to them. This last one, the ‘’Apse Family’’, was to be like the others, only she was to be still stronger, still safer, still more roomy and comfortable. I believe they meant her to last forever. They had her built composite—iron, teak-wood, and greenheart, and her scantling was something fabulous. If ever an order was given for a ship in a spirit of pride! ”

“ Surely you’ve heard of the great firm of Apse & Sons, ship-owners. They had a pretty big fleet. There was the ‘’Lucy Apse’’, and the ‘’Harold Apse’’, and ‘’Anne, John, Malcolm, Clara, Juliet’’, and so on—no end of ‘’Apses’’. Every brother, sister, aunt, cousin, wife—and grandmother, too, for all I know—of the firm had a ship named after them. Good, solid, old-fashioned lot they were, too, built to carry and to last. None of your newfangled labor-saving appliances in them, but plenty of men and plenty of good salt beef and hardtack put aboard—and off you go to fight your way out and home again. ”

“ One day in dock at home, while loafing on the forecastle head, I noticed two respectable salts come along, one a middle-aged, competent, steady man evidently, the other a smart youngish chap. They read the name on the bows, and stopped, looking at her. Says the elder man: ‘’ ‘Apse Family’’. That’s the sanguinary female dog’ [I’m putting it in that way] of a ship, Jack, that kills a man every voyage. ”

“ I followed him all over the empty ship to and fro, here and there, with no living soul about but the two of us, because the old ship-keeper, who had known him from a boy, had locked himself up in the galley—both doors. Suddenly poor Charley mutters in a crazy voice, ‘I’m done here,’ and strides down the gangway, with me at his heels, up the dock, out at the gate, on towards Tower Hill. He used to take rooms with a decent old landlady in America Square, to be near his work.
“All at once he stops, turns round, and comes straight at me. ”

“ But they were a stiff-necked generation, all those Apses. They wouldn’t admit there could be anything wrong with the ‘’Apse Family’’. They wouldn’t even change her name. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ as Mrs. Colchester said. They ought at least to have shut her up for life in some dry dock or other away up the river, and never let her smell salt water again. I assure you, my dear sir, that she invariably did kill some one every voyage she made. It was perfectly well known. She got a name for it, far and wide.”
I expressed my surprise that a ship with such a reputation could ever get a crew. ”

“ You would have thought that a ship so full of deadly tricks would run herself ashore some day out of sheer cussedness. But not she! She was going to last for ever. She had a nose to keep off the bottom.”
Jermyn made a grunt of approval.
“A ship after a pilot’s own heart,” jeered the man in tweeds, “eh? Well, Wilmot managed it. He was the man for it, but even he, perhaps, couldn’t have done the trick without the green-eyed governess or nurse or whatever she was to the children of Mr. and Mrs. Pamphilius.
“They were passengers in her from Port Adelaide to the Cape. ”

“ He couldn’t use the compass-card, but it didn’t matter to him, because his orders were to sail her close. ‘I thought it funny,’ he said, ‘that the ship should keep on falling off in squalls like this, but I luffed her up every time as close as I was able. It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand before my face, and the rain came in bucketfuls on my head.’
“It seems that at every squall the wind hauled aft a little, till gradually the ship came to be heading straight for the coast, without a single soul in her being aware of it. ”

“ The old gentleman had retired from active business twenty-five years before, and was ninety-six at the time, if a day, so his death wasn’t perhaps so surprising. Still Mr. Lucian Apse was convinced that his father would have lived to a hundred. So we may put him at the head of the list. Next comes the poor devil of a shipwright that brute caught and squashed as she went off the ways. They called it the launch of a ship, but I’ve heard people say that, from the wailing and yelling and scrambling out of the way, it was more like letting a devil loose upon the river. ”

“ She had not gone three times her own length when, at a little pluck the tug gave her to enter the dock gates, she made one of her rampaging starts, and put such a weight on the check rope—a new six-inch hawser—that forward there they had no chance to ease it round in time and it parted. I saw the broken end fly up high in the air. Next moment she came against the pier-head with a jar that staggered everybody about her decks. She didn’t hurt herself—not she. But one of her boys the mate had sent aloft on the mizzen to do something, came down on the poop-deck—thump! ”

“ Nobody moved; and the poor fellow raises his two big brown hands slowly to his throat and with one single tug rips everything open—collar, shirt, waistcoat, into rags—a perfect wreck and ruin of a man. Father and I got him up-stairs somehow, and mother pretty nearly killed herself nursing him through a brain-fever.”
The man in tweeds nodded at me significantly.
“Ah! there was nothing that could be done with that brute. She had a devil in her.”
“Where’s your brother?” I asked, expecting to hear he was dead. But he was commanding a ship on the China coast and had not been home for years. ”

“ Old Jermyn fetched a heavy sigh, and the handkerchief being now sufficiently dry, put it up tenderly to his red and lamentable nose.
“You understand now,” the man in tweeds started again, “why I was glad to hear that lunatic Wilmot had managed to dash her brains out on some rocks in Spencer Gulf. She was a ravening beast. A ship may be given a certain latitude in her temper—but when it comes to killing women! . . . Old Colchester put his foot down and resigned ”

“ Men are cheap, God knows!’ The younger one spat in the water alongside. ‘They won’t have me—not for double wages.’ They hung about for some time, and then walked up the dock. Half an hour later I saw them both on our deck, looking round for the mate, and apparently very anxious to be taken on. ”

“ I wouldn’t sign in her—not for Joe, I wouldn’t.’ And the other says: ‘If she were mine, I’d have her towed on the mud and set on fire, blame if I wouldn’t.’ Then the first man chimes in: ‘Much do they care. ”

“ Sorry enough for poor Wilmot, though. That man and I used to be chums at one time. Of course that was the end of him. A clear case, if there ever was one. No way out of it—none at all.”
The voice belonged to the gentleman Miss Blank had never seen before. He straddled his long legs on the hearth-rug. Jermyn, leaning forward, held his pocket handkerchief spread out before the grate. He looked back dismally over his shoulder, and as I slipped behind one of the little wooden tables I nodded to him. On the other side of the fire, imposingly calm and large, sat Mr. ”